by Pablo Tusset
I had smoked an entire Ducados before I spotted a free taxi. I hailed it and asked the driver to take me to the main entrance of the Clinical Hospital, thinking I might sniff around there a bit before going to pick up Bagheera – it was only a few blocks away from the car park on Villarroel where I had left it the night before.
‘I’d like to know if the body of Francesc Robellades is still here at the hospital, or if it has been sent to some outside morgue. He died last night in an accident,’ I said to the lady at the information desk, very solicitous. She looked into the mystery by consulting a computer screen that, from my position, I wasn’t able to get a look at.
‘The body has already been transferred to the Forensic Institute. They must be preparing to take it over to Sancho de Avila by now.’
‘Would it be possible to speak with a doctor who knows about the case?’
The lady started to say something about medical information hours, but warned me that as a rule the hospital generally spoke with family members only. I am aware that Sam Spade would have gone straight to the wing in question, marched down the hallway disguised as a neurosurgeon, and examined the cadaver with his own two eyes. To say nothing of what Mrs Fletcher would have managed. But the thought of inspecting the corpses of accident victims until I hit the right dead man made me a little woozy. I had no choice but to withdraw on this count.
I had already said thank you to the information lady when another idea suddenly popped into my head.
‘Would you happen to know if someone by the name of Gerardo Berrocal is registered as a patient here?’
Stairway eleven, second floor, orthopedics, room forty-three. Right upstairs. Berri.
‘Would you be able to tell me the nature of his medical problems?’
The lady looked at the electronic file on him: contusions, a broken tibia with open wounds and a pretty smashed-up wrist. Not very pleasant, but he’d make it back onto a motorcycle eventually.
I left the hospital and walked down to the car park on Villarroel, took Bagheera out and drove back to the neighbourhood, cruising at slow speed. On the way, I remembered I had two Guardian Angels on my tail and peered into the rearview mirror looking for the white Opel Kadett. There they were, but they weren’t alone: they seemed to be flanked by a giant Honda motorbike that was hovering near me as well. In point of fact, it amounted to no less than 750 cubic centimetres under the command of a little tough guy decked out in head-to-toe leather and topped off by a heavy-duty helmet. Sufficient for keeping tabs on a Lotus Esprit tooling down the motorway.
I pulled up in front of The First’s building, left Bagheera double-parked with the lights on and went inside, hoping that the goons stationed there would let me go upstairs to pick up Lady First’s identification card.
In the front hall, I found the doorman – different from the one I’d seen on other occasions – accompanied by a serious gorilla. God only knew how my father had managed to convince the neighbours to let that kind of guy stand guard in the entrance hall of an otherwise respectable building, but he’d done it. Thanks to Lady First’s description he recognised me with no problem – I could tell because he immediately looked away, turned around, and raised his hand to his ear and spoke into a tiny microphone hidden somewhere in his blazer. I said hello. They responded. I went straight over to the bank of letter boxes, patted around on the top surface until I located the overturned name plate and affixed it to the corresponding box. They let me be until I started walking over toward the lift. Then the doorman popped out in front of me.
‘Pablo Miralles?’
‘Yes. I’m going up to see my sister-in-law.’
‘She’s trying to get some sleep. She left this for you.’
It was her ID card: Gloria Garriga Miranda. Fine: she saved me a trip up to the penthouse. I went back to Bagheera. I was starting to get stressed the fuck out.
At the post office there was a reasonably short line. Its brief length, however, was more than compensated by the eternity each customer took, which made the wait sufficiently irritating. A “no smoking” sign was posted on the wall. A school-free and leash-free child trotted around the office beneath the indulgent stewardship of his poor excuse for a mother, while a dog was forced to wait at the door as his/her master licked large quantities of postage stamps. The dog was reasonably quiet and was not even wearing fluorescent socks, which only seemed to prove how very wicked the human race can be. Just as I was on the verge of immobilising the child via a direct hit in the solar plexus, it was suddenly my turn at the window. Saved by the bell, as they say, though this bell came in the form of a post office bureaucrat with eyeglasses, who looked at me with a face that seemed to say “and what the fuck do you want?”
‘I’m here to pick up an envelope.’
‘Do you have the notification slip?’
‘No, but …’
No matter what I could have said, it was utterly irrelevant to him. After my long, involved explanation, the guy repeated the same question over again, although this time around he framed it in a tone that expressed the infinite patience he had for the collection of morons who came into this office every day to bother him. I tried to explain it from the beginning all over again, but he didn’t even look at me this time; he seemed far more interested in one of his fingernails.
‘I cannot give out any packages without the notification slip.’
As far as I was concerned, the issue had entered Phase B.
‘Right. I’d like to speak with the supervisor of this office, then. Im-mediately.’
‘I’m sorry, that isn’t going to be possible.’
‘Really? Well, if he doesn’t come out right away, see that chair over there? I’m going to put it in the middle of this room, get up on it, pull down my pants, and if the supervisor still hasn’t come out, then I’ll just start wanking off right there in front of everybody: women, children, dogs too. And I’ll make sure to ejaculate as far as possible – and let me warn you, I have damn good aim. So do whatever you think is best.’
‘Excuse me: I already told you the supervisor cannot come out. And if you continue to insist upon it, I will have to call the police.’
‘Do what you have to do, but warn them to bring a couple of sponges because they’ll be able to open a sperm bank with all the come I’m going to leave on that wall. I’ve been saving up for a couple of weeks now.’
‘What do I care?’ he said. ‘All right. Next in line, please.’
He fancied himself quite the tough guy, but he didn’t know who he was messing with. I turned halfway around, picked up the chair that I had been referring to and, making all the noise I possibly could, placed it in the middle of the office and climbed up on it, not without a slight bit of difficulty given that my body was somewhat unfit for any type of climb. Then, from that high vantage point which only emphasised my triumphant mass, I struck up a bit of a sorcerer’s pose to ensure I had sufficiently stolen the audience’s attention. Then I began the spectacle, slowly unbuttoning my shirt.
‘The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout …’
I sang the tune with my right arm raised, with the appropriate manual choreography as accompaniment. When my left hand had undone all but the last two buttons of my shirt, I saw the postal clerk scurry toward a door that led to some unidentifiable back office. I quickly got down from the chair, put it back in its place and buttoned up by the time the lackey had returned with his superior, so that I would seem like any other, vaguely normal person waiting at the counter. The superior in question was a fortysomething woman in a grey jacket and a little postal office name tag on her lapel: a model of efficiency. I told her that due to construction work that was being carried out in my sister-in-law’s building, the identification on her letter box had been removed, etcetera, etcetera. After a bit of hesitating, she finally handed over the envelope and made me sign some paper and asked for my own ID card in addition to that of Lady First. Luckily she didn’t seem to care that it had expired.
/> I returned to the Beast and parked on the sidewalk to examine the envelope at my leisure.
I opened it up and extracted a manilla folder filled with papers. Many papers. The first one was a multi-page report that had been drawn up by an American company specialising in commercial assessments. I scanned it quickly. The second thing was a brochure for some gym equipment, which I immediately disregarded. Had Lady First placed these papers in the envelope exactly as they had been placed in that desk drawer?, I asked myself. A detective’s job is never as easy as it looks: you have to ask the right questions, naturally, but you also have to know how to interpret the answers, and my syllogistic intelligence tends to be stymied by an excess of imagination, such that as soon as I arrive at the only possible answer to an enigma, I immediately think up another twenty-five possibilities that get in the way. So I sat there for a while, flipping through the papers over and over again to see what jumped out at me. It was a real mishmosh of things: copies of letters to clients, a business card (Bernardo Almáciga, Coiffeur), more commercial assessments, a bill from a posh mechanic for a tune-up and an oil change (five hundred euros plus VAT), a Gucci tie catalogue, a few Microsoft Access printouts, a note written in my Magnificent Brother’s magnificent penmanship (‘Half is less than what one may think,’ it read) and … toward the end of the little pile, various computer-printed pages, stapled together, with a long list of addresses. June 22 was the date on the document header, followed by a list of addresses, in various European cities: Bordeaux, Manchester … Very quickly, on page three, I found this:
G.S.W. Amanci Viladrau
Password: 25th Montanyà St;
08029-Barcelona (Spain)
Address: 15th, Jaume Guillamet St, 08029-Barcelona (Spain)
I found it so quickly partially because I was looking out for it but also because it was highlighted with an irregular circle that made it stand out on the page. Just outside of the circle, in the same pencil and in the same superlative penmanship, one single word had been written.
Pablo.
A shiver ran up my spine, and I almost tossed the paper aside from the shock. Seeing my name there seemed like some kind of jinx, I dont know, it was like the graphic representation of me, standing in front of that little walled-in garden on Jaume Guillamet, like a sinister premonition that was only just beginning to be fulfilled.
I had started up the engine when something suddenly hit me: my Magnificent Brother always calls me Pablo José, just like my Mother’s Highness. And he does it precisely because he knows I dislike it when people address me as such. Even on the Post-Its he uses for himself, he always writes “P. José”, just as he had my number recorded on his mobile. So you can imagine the vertigo I felt when it occurred to me that my Magnificent Sister-in-Law just might have forged the note, imitating her husband’s handwriting expressly so that I would see it and take special note of the address.
Once again, the more I knew, the less I knew. But instead of allowing myself to drown in the abyss, I chose to drive over to Robellades’ office.
The traffic was a major drag. The Barcelona board of education must have opened its cages right about then, because a couple of human mutts toting school bags (or those modern substitutes, with wheels and other accessory attachments) trotted over and tried to get close to the window so they could check out Bagheera’s interior. I growled at them and they went running for cover behind a postbox, where they proffered me a fuck-you gesture with their arms. Ignatius J. Reilly was right: there is no such thing as geometry or theology anymore. There isn’t jack shit.
Half an hour later I arrived at the Robellades consultancy, which occupied the second floor of an old building. The girl who greeted me at the reception desk was the same one I had spoken to on the phone. Now that she saw me in person, I think she kind of dug me, maybe because for women I seem to represent all the things they’ve been taught to despise. And that is often quite a little turn-on for them. Given the severity called for by the rather grim occasion, however, she limited herself to being polite and properly cordial. I collected the envelope, paid the three hundred euros requested by the invoice she then handed me, and after another few seconds I was downstairs again, face to face with a traffic cop who was taking note of Bagheera’s number plate.
‘Ticket?’
‘Yes, sir. You’ve parked in a zone for loading and unloading, commercial vehicles only.’
‘Would it be worth anything if I said I came to load this envelope?’
‘And are you also going to tell me that this is a commercial vehicle?’
‘It’s a Kuwaiti taxicab, sir. You know what those sheikhs are like …’
‘Right: they put Barcelona number plates on all their sport-model taxicabs.’
‘The B is for Burqan, south-west corner of the country. Funny coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Nice try. But you’re going to have to tell your sheikh that if he really wants, he can to try to appeal it.’
Forty euros. I thought about paying it on the spot, but I decided it would be better to have them just send it on to my Magnificent Brother, to piss him off when he returned. I rounded the corner and pulled over on another wide sidewalk, the Carretera de Sarriá, to read the report. Another decent-sized envelope, but thinner than the one I’d picked up at the post office. This one contained only three typewritten sheets of paper.
Barcelona, blah, blah. Mr and Mrs Molucas, preliminary report on the blah, blah, blah, disappearance of Eulalia Robles Miranda (why did that last name sound so familiar?), etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and another page and a half of etceteras that I more or less disregarded and then at the end, a bold-face conclusion.
‘With all due caution, we believe that her disappearance is most likely related to that of Sebastian Miralles, who seems to have a certain conflict of interest with a certain real-estate company, that is most probably based in or around the city of Bilbao. His disappearance is very likely due to the pending resolution of this real-estate issue.
‘Finally, given the aforementioned information, we cannot discard the possibility that the two aforementioned people may be travelling together of their own free will, and may be located at the present time somewhere in the north of Spain.’
Too much. The Robelladeses had done a good job – I realised this as I reread the report from start to finish in the interest of following all the steps of the investigation that had led them to their conclusions. I also realised that the last source with whom they had been in touch had no doubt been my Mother’s Highness, the queen of misinformation. If the KGB had hired her, Texas would be part of the USSR today: only she could have suggested that bit about the Bilbao property-management company, which could only be the Ibarra that graced the jar of mayonnaise in my kitchen. For a moment, though, I did feel liberated from that invisible weight on my shoulders when I double-checked that no mention had been made of the house on Jaume Guillamet. There was nothing at all to suggest that there was any connection between the guy’s death and my case. Of course, right then I remembered the tyre tracks and the little bits of yellow headlight glass scattered not fifty metres from the little garden on Guillamet. If it was a coincidence, it was quite an unusual one. It seemed far more likely that Robellades Junior had hit upon some new lead after his father had already drafted the report, and had decided to follow it up himself – all the way down to the bottom of an excavation pit for a new neighbourhood car park, four stories below street level.
I still had a wad of bills that I had stuck in my pocket when I’d left the house, but I stopped at a cash machine anyway for six hundred more. Then, as I went down Travessera again, I thought of going to look for Nico. Maybe I could buy some coke off of him, and in any event it wouldn’t kill me to stock up on hash – with all the activity, my stash had diminished considerably. I double-parked for a second and went into the plaza.
No sign of Nico.
On my way back to the Beast I bumped into the same Guardian Angel I’d seen before at the g
as station. He had gotten out of the Kadett and followed me through the plaza.
‘Sorry to have made you break into a run. I just stopped for a second to look for a friend,’ I said.
‘No problem, do whatever you want. Occupational hazards, you know.’
‘Have you got the time?’
‘Two.’
Time to start thinking about the old tummy.
‘Hey: how would you like some lunch? It’s on me.’
‘Hmm … I’d have to ask Lopez about that.’
Lopez, it turned out, was the other Guardian Angel, who had stayed behind in the car. We approached him. He was a pot-bellied fiftyish type, dressed in an outmoded blazer. I repeated the invitation through the window.
‘Thanks, but we can’t do it.’
‘Come on, man. I’m hungry, and when I go into a restaurant I take a long time before coming out. What are you two going to do until then, park outside the door and order a pizza?’
‘It wouldn’t do for us to be seen together.’
